Saturday, December 13, 2014

A fascinating academic journal article from Japan below. The Japanese and Chinese are less politically correct in talking about race than Americans are -- if only because they mostly believe that THEY are a superior race. And in average IQ terms, they are.

And the finding below, that high IQ people in Japan are taller, richer and less prone to crime and divorce, agrees well with American findings going back as far as the 1920s.

Not mentioned in the Abstract below but mentioned in the body of the article, is that the Koreans and Chinese score a touch higher on IQ than the Japanese do -- only by about one or two points but that is in the opposite direction to what one would expect. The Japanese are more Westernized than the Chinese are -- though that difference is diminishing rapidly -- so if there were any "Western" bias in the tests (which Leftists often assert there is), one would have expected the Japanese to be slightly ahead. Clearly, any "bias" in the tests is not detectable in the far East -- being detectable only by American Ivy League "wisdom".

But there is one point inferable from the findings below that seems at first completely regular -- the finding that the closer you get to the equator, the browner and dumber you get. The Japanese archipelago does cover a very considerable North/South range so there is plenty of room for that to emerge. So the really smart Japanese are in the Northern Prefectures of Honshu while the dumbest are in Okinawa.

And in South-East Asia we find the same phenomenon. Filipinos and Malaysian Bumiputras are notably browner and less bright than North-East Asians.

But that is not as regular as one might think. There are a number of exceptions to the rule. South Africa has a climate similar to Europe (if you have experienced a Bloemfontein winter you will know what I mean) yet the Bantu (South African negroes) are no brighter than any other Africans as far as we can tell. But that is only a superficial puzzle. The Bantu are recent immigrants originating in central Africa. The whites in fact arrived in South Africa before the Bantu did.

The Bushmen (original inhabitants) of South Africa are a little more of a puzzle as they are very primitive indeed. They are short of stature and live these days in extremely arid regions. Perhaps they always did live in arid regions to escape the many fierce predators in the rest of Africa.

And Tasmanian Aborigines were also at an extremely low civilizational level (they did not even use fire) before white-man diseases killed them all off. Yet Tasmania has a climate quite similar to England. Tasmania is however a rather small island that was cut off from the rest of Australia for many millennia -- and isolated populations are often backward. It appears that lots of invasions are needed to perk up average IQ -- which is why Eurasia is home to all the high IQ populations. Invaders can very easily sweep for long distances across Eurasia -- as Genghis Khan showed.

So the "exceptions" I have noted so far are all explicable by special factors. But there is one exception that absolutely breaks the rule: South India. South Indians can be very dark in skin color indeed. Yet they are far and away the brightest populations in India. The computer programmers, scientists and technologists in India come overwhelmingly from the South. The recent amazing Indian Mars shot was almost entirely the work of Southerners. It is no coincidence that Bangalore, India's science and technology hub, is in the South.

So what went on in the South to push them up the IQ scale is hard to say. The nearest I can come to an explanation is to note that they all hate one-another. The various regions have different languages and were often at war with one-another over the centuries. So perhaps invasions did the trick there too. But then West Africans are are always fighting one-another as well ...

So perhaps we have to draw into the discussion that some evolutionarily recent DNA mutations affecting brain complexity did not spread to Africa. Evolution can of course work either via natural selection or via mutations -- or both

A final note about the correlations reported below. They seem unusually high. That is common in "ecological" correlations (correlations between groups rather than individuals). It was Prefecture averages that formed the raw data below. Individual correlations between similar variables can normally be expected to be much lower -- JR

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Abstract

Regional differences in IQ are estimated for 47 prefectures of Japan. IQ scores obtained from official achievement tests show a gradient from north to south. Latitudes correlate with height, IQ, and skin color at r = 0.70, 0.44, 0.47, respectively. IQ also correlates with height (0.52), skin color (0.42), income (0.51) after correction, less homicide rate (− 0.60), and less divorce (− 0.69) but not with fertility infant mortality. The lower IQ in southern Japanese islands could be attributable to warmer climates with less cognitive demand for more than fifteen hundred years.